by Aimée de Jongh

From Feb 17th – April 15th you are welcome to visit the exhibition “Graphic recordings, travelling artists and comics journalism” in the Stedelijk Museum in the city of Kampen (The Netherlands).

The show has work from many inspiring Dutch and Belgian comic artists that have travelled and turned their experiences into the most beautiful drawings and comics. Jeroen Janssen, Jules Calis and Gijs Kast are among those artists and some of them are close friends of mine, and I admire their work a lot. From me, there will be some pages from the Lesbos project, some audio that I recorded in the refugee camps. This audio was supposed to be used for an interactive website with pictures, but we never finished it. I’m glad that the audio has found a way to the public nevertheless…

This week I’ll be in Angoulême with the team of “Les Phares Du Nord”, a group of Flemish and Dutch authors who will sign their books and talk about their work. The Dutch Fund for Literature and the Flemish Fund of Literature joined forces to make this happen, in order to promote and celebrate comics in Dutch language. Hooray! Other authors in this group are Brecht Evens, Herr Seele, Erik Kriek, Simon Spruyt, Ward Zwart, and Enzo Smits. The signings will also be joined by Joost Swarte and others.

Today, after 3 months, the comic report that I made about my stay in a refugee camp at Lesbos has been published by Dutch newspaper NRC. Since there are no photos or film allowed in the camps, I joined two other cartoonists (Mei-Li Nieuwland and Judith Vanistendael) on a trip to Lesbos, to draw the situation there. The end result is a series of three comic reports that are published in two newspapers in The Netherlands and Belgium. It’s the first time that the three of us took on graphic journalism.

The week in the camp was an experience I’ll never forget. I met many refugees there and also made very good friends among them. I hope that, with these comics, people will realize that the problems at Lesbos are not solved at all – even though the media stopped reporting about it. There are still people arriving everyday, and they live in camps that sometimes don’t even have water or electricity. What struck me most is the number of young children, living in an environment that’s even dangerous and terrifying for adults. This is Europe, on an island where tourists arrive on luxury cruises and drink fancy cocktails in the harbour. The contradiction is heartbreaking.